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Features and Translation Strategies of English News
Headlines
Yonghong Wu
Xi’an University, School of Foreign Studies, 710065
Keywords: English news headlines; Features; Translation
Strategies
Abstract. News headline plays a significant part in various
news, therefore news headline, especially its E-C translation, is
drawing more attention. This thesis attempts to probe into the
translation of English news headlines from the perspective of
Communicative Translation and Semantic Translation in quest of
efficient ways to accurately transmit information and retain as
many cultural characteristics of the original headlines as
possible. In this thesis, the author makes a thorough analysis of
English news headlines on four levels, namely, the lexical, the
grammatical,
the rhetorical and the cultural. Based upon this analysis, the
author points out that Communicative Translation is an appropriate
option to handle the translation of English news headlines
featuring
lexical and grammatical characteristics since they are closely
affiliated with information transmission. While dealing with the
rhetorical and cultural features of English news headlines,
translators can adopt Semantic Translation since they reflect
the linguistic style and cultural elements of the original news
headlines. In practical translation, the author holds that
Communicative Translation and Semantic Translation cannot be
employed separately. Only when the translator keeps both of them in
a harmonious way can the translation be successful.
Since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policies,
Chinese people have gained more chances to communicate with other
countries and regions in the world, so the translation of
news headlines deserves special attention. Based upon the past
achievements, the current author attempts to make a
comprehensive
investigation of English news headlines and then probe into
their translation from the perspective of Newmark’s Communicative
Translation and Semantic Translation theory in quest of efficient
ways
to accurately transmit information and retain as many cultural
characteristics of original headlines as possible. The author
points out that Communicative Translation is an appropriate option
to
handle the translation of English news headlines featuring
lexical and grammatical characteristics since they are closely
affiliated with information transmission. While dealing with the
rhetorical and
cultural features of English news headlines, translators can
adopt Semantic Translation since they reflect the linguistic style
and cultural elements of the original news headlines. In
practical
translation process, the author holds that Communicative
Translation and Semantic Translation cannot be employed separately,
or neither of them can be exclusively treated as an alternative
for
the other. Only if the translator keeps both of them in a
harmonious way would the translation be successful.
Features of News Headlines
Generally, headlines are classified into single-deck headlines
and multi-deck headlines, whose
features are as the following: The Lexical Features of News
Headlines. Midget words, especially nouns, are favored by news
headlines, such as Energy savers, Hi-tech Project Highlights 5
Areas etc. Vogue words mushroom with the progression of society,
for example, Internetese, bio-chip,
American Online: Often Down, Never Out Abbreviations (or
acronyms) and numerical words are used in a large scale. For
example, expo,
com’l, UNSC, WTC Flag Returned to NY Delegation (WTC=the World
Trade Centre, NY=New York), QE2 may subs’ target (QE2=Queen
Elizabeth II; subs=submarines).
The Grammatical Features of News Headlines. It is a common
practice for English news headlines to omit certain elements to
achieve syntactical terseness. Function words like articles,
prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns are often omitted and
occasionally substantives such as
7th International Conference on Social Network, Communication
and Education (SNCE 2017)
Copyright © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This
is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
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noun, verb can be also eliminated.
Forecast of Mexican Quake Accurate, But ignored (= the Forecast
of Mexican Quake Accurate, But It Is Ignored)
Ten Die in Kashmir Tempe Attack (= Ten People Die in the Kashmir
Temple Attack) The Rhetorical Features of News Headlines.
Rhetorical devices including metaphor, pun,
alliteration, repetition, contrast etc. are widely used which
are aimed at creating musical sound as well as vivid images to
enable the readers to obtain spiritual enjoyment.
The New Beetle Hits Town (metaphor) Egg Talks: Agricultural
Advisers Meet (pun)
Desperate Need, desperate deed (rhyme) Overfed, Overpaid,
Over-sexed And Over Here! (repetition)
The Cultural Features of News Headlines. Language is the carrier
of culture. News, as a practical text genre, inevitably bears
cultural characteristics of a certain country or nation.
English
news headlines are bound with western cultural elements: the
unique ideology, values, customs, etc. Cultural features are
typically reflected in the following aspects:
First, quite a few English news headlines are derived from
English idioms or allusions. For example,
For many in cinema, all roads led to wilder “All roads led to
Wilder” is adapted from the English idiom “all roads lead to Rome”.
Billy
Wilder is a famous American movie director. The adapted idiom
used here means for all of his movie fans, Wilder’s movies are
forever accessible and memorable.
To Buy or not to Buy It is instantly recognizable that the
headline is composed from the renowned quotation in
Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. Here, the headline is used to
depict stock investors’ conflicting minds.
Secondly, tropes in English news headlines bear unique
associations due to cultural influence. “Hawk” and “dove” refer to
the uncompromising and conciliatory political tendencies
respectively.
Another pair of tropes is “donkey” and “elephant”, which are
symbols of American Democratic Party and Republican Party.
A fund-raising dinner held for fat cats Fat cats here refer to
magnates contributing funds to support elections in western
countries.
Slang or dialectical expressions are often adopted to cater for
a specific readership. Cops: Man Wanted in N.J. Arrested
(policemen)
Has Packaging Gone Bananas? (to become very angry, crazy and
silly)
Translation Strategies of News Headlines from the Perspective of
CT & ST
Taking into account other important facets of translation such
as the translator’s purpose, the nature of readership and text
typology, Newmark develops two modes of translation, namely,
Communicative Translation and Semantic Translation, which are
believed to be more practical than those idealized discussions on
translation methods. This thesis has proposed only two methods
of
translation that are appropriate to any text: (a) Communicative
Translation, where the translator attempts to produce the same
effect on the TL (Target Language) readers as was produced by
the
original on the SL (Source Language) readers, and (b) Semantic
Translation, where the translator attempts, within the bare
syntactic and semantic constraints of the TL, to reproduce the
precise contextual meaning of the author (Newmark, 2001b:22). As
this definition indicates,
Communicative Translation focuses essentially upon the
comprehension and response of TL receptors while Semantic
Translation centers around the semantic content of the SL
texts.
The language of news headlines presents unique characteristics
on the lexical, grammatical, rhetorical and cultural levels. In
this section, the author will carry out the translation of
English
news headlines from the four levels accordingly. Lexis is a very
basic and important device to help achieve the brevity effect of
news headlines.
The wide use of midget words, abbreviations, acronyms and
coinages in English news headlines are
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all intended for that purpose.
Midget words are widely used in news headlines writing in order
to fit into the limited headline space. Furthermore, midget words
have much larger semantic category, and are also more lively
and
flexible. we can adopt Communicative Translation because the
purpose of using midget words coincides
with the features of Communicative Translation. Communicative
Translation is likely to be smoother, simpler, clearer, more direct
and easier to read.
Besides the midget words, in order to save more space and
achieve briefness, abbreviations and acronyms are also widely used
in English news headlines.
Abbreviation refers to the clippings only to keep the first
part, the middle part or the ending part of the original words,
while the rest parts are shortened or clipped away for the sake of
saving
space. It requires translators to be familiar with the
journalistic conventions. When translating,
translators should turn to Communicative Translation since it’s
targeted at readership which requires that more emphasis should be
put on information transmission rather than the retaining of
the
original form. When translating headlines with acronyms, the
translator should not leave acronyms to the
readers to figure out their meanings. Instead, it’s their job to
tell the potential readers their exact meanings.
In order to achieve the purpose of highlighting completely the
points of a piece of news in limited space, editors not only choose
words for their brevity and dramatic quality but also use very
condensed structures. Thus headlines usually have a set of
distinctive grammatical rules which are totally different from the
common grammar.
So, it’s a common practice for English news headlines to omit
certain elements to achieve syntactical terseness. Function words
like articles, prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns are
often omitted and occasionally substantives such as nouns, verbs
can also be eliminated. In dealing with news headlines
characterized by omission, translators should focus on
translating
information words since the function words generally enjoy no
substantial meanings and what roles they play just remain in the
grammatical dimension. As for the omission of nouns, for better
understanding, some words shall be added in the translating
process. The flexible use of tense is another distinctive
grammatical feature of news report, which can be
best manifested in headlines. “In headlines, present tense,
which is also called journalistic present tense, is widely used to
indicate the events that happened in the
past. The function of such device is the same as that of
historical present tense in literature works, which is to create a
sense of immediacy and leave readers a sense of reality” (Xu
Mingwu, 2003:
226). According to the investigation by Professor Zhang Jian,
three tenses are usually used in
headlines: the simple present tense, the simple future tense and
the present progressive tense. (Zhang Jian, 1 994: 5)
To sum up, Communicative Translation is suggested to handle the
translation of English news headlines featuring unique
characteristics on the lexical and grammatical levels.
A fresh and appropriate rhetoric device will more often than not
make the statement lively, impressive and interesting. Since
translators must ensure the faithful information transmission on
the one hand and also reserve the rhetorical features of headlines
on the other hand, translators
should use Communicative and Semantic Translation alternately in
dealing with the translation of headlines characterized by rhetoric
devices.
In news headlines translation, Communicative Translation could
retain the original denotation of the headline while explaining the
connotation that target language readers need to know. Before
dealing with the rhetoric devices, translators should do some
preliminary work such as searching for the background knowledge
about the report, the journalist’s viewpoint about the event. Based
upon
the preliminary work, translators can then accurately figure out
the connotation of the devices and then try to find equivalent
Chinese devices to reproduce the effect obtained by original
readers on
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our Chinese readers.
Written at the author’s linguistic level, semantic translation
can help recreate the precise flavor and tone of the original text.
In practical translation, translators should first conduct an
in-depth
research on that rhetoric device, figuring out their
connotations in the news context and comparing them with Chinese
rhetorical.
Rhythm is the most-widely-used rhetorical device in writing
headlines because both reporters and editors attempt to leave
readers a deep impression at their very first sight of the news.
And
rhythm is just a proper means to fulfill this purpose because it
can produce a special sound effect when read, which will in turn
arouse readers’ desire to finish the news. Generally speaking,
rhythm
falls into two categories: alliteration and rhyme. “Alliteration
is a device that repeats the same sound at frequent intervals and
since the sound
repeated is usually the initial consonant, it’s also called
front rhythm” (Feng Cuihua, 1983: 91). “Pun is the use of a word in
such a way as to suggest two or more meanings or different
associations, or the use of two or more words of the same or
nearly the same sound with different meanings. In this way, a
humorous effect can be produced.” (Feng Cuihua, 1983:91) News
headline
editors often employ this device in their news writing because
there are many words in English language which look or sound alike,
but have different senses, or connotations. If cleverly
combined, these words will produce all unexpected effects.
‘‘Metonymy is the act of referring to something by the name of
something else that is closely
connected with it.” (Homby, 2004:1094) Journalists and news
reporters use metonymy frequently and are constantly creating new
substitutes since it can express briefly and effectively what
would
otherwise require a whole clause or sentence. Parody is to
imitate any of the well-known sayings, idioms, proverbs, etc. In
main structure
while changing one or more words so as to achieve certain
effects like humorous, sarcastic, more persuasive, etc. It wins
great favor of headline writers for their witty and humorous
effect.
Antithesis means sharply contrasting ideas are juxtaposed in a
balanced or parallel phrase or grammatical structure. Employing
antithesis in headlines can make headlines vivid and
impressive.
For the readers, they can understand two parts well by
contrasting the two extremes. To conclude, headlines translation
must be based on the precise understanding of the news
content. With the emphasis on its readability of the translated
version, translators should not rigidly stick to the original
rhetoric devices. Instead they should make any necessary changes
and
adopt different and proper translation techniques. In the
translation of news headlines translators should also be aware of
the cultural dements and
adopt Communicative and Semantic Translation alternately
according to the distance between the source language culture and
the target language culture. Communicative Translation is subject
to
target culture which means translator should clarify those
cultural dements in source language text that may cause ambiguity
and misunderstanding for target language readers, and thus some
source
language cultural elements maybe sacrificed for the sake of easy
understanding. The cultural elements transplanted from source
culture should be compatible with target language culture.
In contrast to Communicative Translation, Semantic Translation
is subject to source culture, which means translator needs to
preserve as much as possible cultural elements in source
language
text, such as figures of speech, idioms, slang and so on, and
give particular notes or explanations to those blurring or
ambiguous cultural elements as necessary. In this way, readers can
get to know a foreign culture which is one of the goals that
readers expect to reach through reading international
news. To sum up, in practical translation, if translators can
find in Chinese an expression that is
completely or almost equivalent to the English one, Semantic
Translation is advisable, they can just substitute the Chinese one
for the English one. However, if they cannot find corresponding
cultural expressions in Chinese, Communicative Translation is
suggested. That is, translators can boldly use newly coined Chinese
words or expressions to retain the original flavor and
meanwhile
provide supplementary information in case Chinese readers may
misunderstand them.
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Conclusion
To sum up, this thesis makes an attempt to apply Newmark’s CT
and ST theory to news headlines translation. In this way, the
translation practice is guided by theory and the quality of the
translated
news headlines can be improved. However, this thesis is far from
being perfect, there is still much room for further improvement.
Firstly, the examples need more comprehensive and in-depth
analysis and more perfect translations should be attempted.
Secondly, due to the limited space and time, only some major
distinctive linguistic, rhetoric and cultural elements are
discussed, other
elements should also be touched in future study.
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